Lock In (Lock In, #1)(50)

“Someone shivved a Haden?” I said. “That’s pretty cold.”

“He was a bad man,” said the agent.

“Look, uh—” I realized I had not gotten the agent’s name.

“Agent Isabel Ibanez,” she said.

“Look, Agent Ibanez,” I said. “I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but I just ran a diagnostic on this threep, and its legs don’t work at all. There appears to be significant damage to them.”

“It’s probably because the threep got hit with a shotgun blast,” Ibanez said.

“A shotgun blast,” I repeated.

“During a firefight with FBI agents, yes,” Ibanez said.

“The owner really must have been a bad man.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“You understand that having a threep that can’t move its legs is going to be a hindrance to the work I need to do today,” I said.

Ibanez stepped to the side and then motioned to the wheelchair she had previously been standing in front of.

“A wheelchair,” I said.

“Yes,” Ibanez said.

“A threep in a wheelchair.”

“Yes,” Ibanez repeated.

“You understand the irony, right?”

“This office is ADA compliant,” Ibanez said. “And as I understand it you are going to a post office, which are also required by law to be ADA compliant. This should be sufficient.”

“You’re actually serious about this,” I said.

“It’s what we have available at the moment,” Ibanez said. “We could rent you a threep, but that would require approvals and paperwork. You’d be here all day.”

“Right,” I said. “Would you excuse me a moment, Agent Ibanez?” I disconnected from the wounded threep before she had a chance to say anything else.

Twenty minutes later I stepped out of an Avis office in Pasadena with a shiny new maroon Kamen Zephyr threep I had rented out of my own pocket, got into the equally maroon Ford I had also rented, and headed toward the Duarte post office. Take that, paperwork.

The Duarte post office was an unassuming box of beige bricks, with arches at the windows to give it a vaguely Spanish air. I went in, stood in line politely while three separate old ladies got stamps and mailed packages, and when I got to the front of the line displayed my badge on my threep’s chest monitor to the postal clerk and asked to see the postmaster.

A small, older man came to the front. “I’m Roberto Juarez,” he said. “I’m the postmaster here.”

“Hi,” I said. “Agent Chris Shane.”

“That’s funny,” Juarez said. “You have the same name as that famous kid.”

“Huh,” I said. “I suppose I do.”

“Was one of you, too,” he said. “A Haden, I mean.”

“I remember that.”

“Must be annoying for you sometimes,” Juarez said.

“It can be,” I said. “Mr. Juarez, about a week ago a man came into your post office to get a money order. I was hoping to talk to you about him.”

“Well, we get a lot of people asking for money orders,” Juarez said. “We have a lot of immigrants in the area, and they send remittances back home. Was this an international or domestic money order?”

“Domestic,” I said.

“Well, that will narrow it down a little,” Juarez said. “We do less of those. Do you have a picture?”

“Do you have a tablet I could borrow for a second?” I asked. I could display the picture on my chest screen but it turns out people feel uncomfortable staring into your chest. The postal clerk, whose name tag listed her as Maria Willis, gave me hers to use. I signed in and accessed the picture of Sani—cleaned up, eyes closed—and showed it to them. “It’s not the best picture,” I said.

Juarez looked at the picture blankly. Willis, on the other hand, put her hand up to her mouth in surprise.

“Oh my God,” she said. “That’s Ollie Green.”

“Ollie Green?” I repeated the name. “As in Oliver Green, and like the color.”

Willis nodded and looked at the picture again. “He’s dead, isn’t he,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry. You knew him?”

“He would come in every week or so to get a money order, an envelope, and a stamp,” Willis said. “He was nice. You could tell he was a little slow”—she looked at me to see if I understood the implication—“but a nice man. Would make small talk if you let him and there wasn’t a line.”

“What would he talk about?” I asked.

“The usual things,” Willis said. “The weather. Whatever movie or TV show he’d seen recently. Sometimes he’d talk about the squirrels he saw on the walk here. He really enjoyed them. He once said he’d like to get a little dog who could chase them. I told him that if he did that, the squirrel and the dog would end up getting run over.”

“He lived nearby, then,” I said. “If he was walking over to the post office.”

“I think he said he lived at the Bradbury Park apartments,” Willis said. “Bradbury Park, Bradbury Villa. Something like that.”